INTRODUCTION #2
SO Who is This Guy With the Goofy Name
AND Why the Hell Should We Listen To Him?
or
Pic’s Tale of the Trenches
A LITTLE ABOUT ME.
I lucked into the business ass-backwards, and I paid the consequences for that luck. The first serious piece of fiction I ever wrote was my first novel Dark Father. I finished the opening fifty pages the summer I graduated college, sent an unsolicited partial off to Pocket Books—which breaks just about every rule of submission you can think of—and somehow the stars aligned correctly so that my manuscript wasn’t immediately drop-kicked back into my lap. I got a call from an editor three days later, did a dance on the dining room table (I can do a hell of a Tarantella when inspired), and sold the book based on the sample chapters.
Sounds slick and simple, right?
Before I’d even fully completed the novel, my editor left the house and a new one came on board who didn’t think much of it, my writing, me personally, or horror in general. When Dark Father came out it pretty much disappeared without a ripple.
They say the first book is the hardest to sell. After that you can cruise along the shoulder of life and just hand the finished novels in one after the other, watch them hit the shelves with startling regularity while you bask in the love and respect of the world, with hefty bank deposit slips scattered at your slippered feet.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into such a frenzy that I choke up my pancreas.
I watched my first novel get remaindered in a matter of months, and I spent the next several years writing novels I couldn’t sell.
And you better believe that I also did a lot of lip-gnawing on sleepless nights, feeling like a failure and trying to rediscover the key that I’d lost without even knowing when in the hell I’d ever had it.
I eventually decided I needed to break into short fiction and follow the more traditional route of honing your narrative skills through your stories before entering into the novel arena. It took another year or so before I’d sharpened my craftsmanship to the point where I could consistently sell my work. This is what novelist Harry Crews calls “turning a corner.” After selling thirty or forty tales, I’d turned the corner and returned to the books, edited and rewrote them, and managed to sell those off as well. The two halves of my career seemed to come together, and all because I went back to the beginning.
If you want to succeed you need to start at the most rudimentary aspect: the blank page.
And if anybody tells you that all you need is a lucky break, tell them to shove off. Luck is about the worst thing that can happen to you in this biz, and it’s no substitute for knowledge, experience, effort and skill.